Paragon's Rage
Paragon's Rage is the name given to the series of almost genocidal wars that served to both bring the Empire of Paragon to its absolute height and at the same time utterly destroy it. The last of the truly Great Wars, Paragon's Rage laid waste to fully a third of the Western Continent and for a brief period succeeded in doing what no man seemed capable of in uniting the entire Eastern Continent. Among the most terrible of all recorded Great Wars - although with the invention of gunpowder, the stage seems set for an inevitable (and far more horrific) repeat - Paragon's Rage was also the conflict within which the Azhahad Guard proved itself as a true fighting force - and one to be feared. The Empire of Paragon The Empire of Paragon was ancient before Azhahad was founded, a centre of wealth, power and slowly becoming decadent culture that stretched like a vast monolith across the entire far coastline of the Western Continent. Ruled by a dynasty whose true origins had long since been lost to the dust of past ages, the Monarch Paragon was supported in their post by a cabal of powerful sorcerers that secured their lives and succession for well-on twenty generations. Their expansion was on the whole peaceful, a result of cultural amalgamation with the border states until they were simply appendages of the Empire followed in time by those states becoming new provinces. It took centuries, but the Monarch Paragons felt that they had that time and many believed that they were right. It was only a matter of time, wrote one scholar of the time five years before the war began, until the Empire stretched from Western Coastline to the City at the Center of the World. And what then would follow? Yet could such a thing truly be feared? The wealth of Paragon was undeniable, both of itself and the provinces that were once independent states. Mystic secrets were happened upon and unravelled by Sorcerers of the Empire that have never been recovered since the war. Artifice flourished, and chronicles speak of feats of enchantment and magical creation that - if true - have never come close to being matched. Totaltarian it might have been, decadent it might have been, yet within the Empire culture and magic flourished in tandem in way that the world has never seen since. What wonders could have been born if they had achieved their goal of uniting the Western Continent? Fortunately and unfortunately in equal measure, the world never had the chance to find out. Twenty years before the war broke out, the current Monarch Paragon fell in love with one of his Royal Sorcerers and declared that he would marry her. Against all tradition, he followed through on this goal, and they were wedded a year later in great ceremony. The couple dazzled their subjects with their fidelity, passion and desire to forge a greater Empire. Yet...not all was well. Five years later the couple had failed to produce an heir, in contrast to every single marriage of Monarch Paragons before them. And then ten years on, still with no child and now haunted by the failure, the spells that extended the Monarch Paragon's age began to fail. Never before had such a thing happened, and a worried Court were quick to ladle blame upon the Paragon's wife. Sorcerers had no place as rulers, they said. And for her seduction of the Monarch Paragon she must be dealt with. Those who knew of the cabal's power fought against the idea, but in the end a shadowy conglomerate of nobles, clergy and those who stood to gain enacted a daring plot that ended with the Sorcerer Queen dead upon the lawn of the Imperial Palace before her husband's windows. Devestated by grief, the Monarch Paragon retreated to his private chambers with the body of his love and the Sorcerers of his cabal, and there he wrought with them a spell that would, in the end, bring to little more than dust all that his ancestors had laboured to build for more than a millennia. The Fury Born The power that rose from the Imperial Palace upon wings of blood and vengeance six months after the death of the Sorcerer Queen had no name as the mortal races understood the term. The spell that created it is likewise unknown, but for the fact that it took the lives of the entire Paragon Cabal to complete it. Yet the day that the Fury Born awakened has lived in history as the day upon which one of the most incredible - and most terrible - acts of sorcery in the history of the world was completed. The being known as the Fury Born has never been understood, yet from the brief discussions recorded by certain very lucky chroniclers it appeared to hold the memories and Power of the Sorcerer Queen, ripped back into reality from beyond the veil of death itself. Forged of blood and imbued with vengeance, the Fury Born wreaked a terrible retribution on those who had killed her before turning her gaze beyond the borders to the Empire once those threats to her power had been sufficiently annihiliated. The Fury Born saw the rest of the world as a vast threat for as long as those who inhabited it were beyond her ability to directly control, and with the morality of the Sorcerer Queen lost somewhere in death, she took to the task of insuring that none would ever have the ability to kill her ever again. Diplomats and foreign tradering factors, some who had maintained links to Paragon for centuries, were swiftly ejected from the Empire and behind a veil of lethal assassins, the Fury Born prepared for war on such a scale that the world had not seen for centuries. Paragon's Rage Paragon's Rage, the name given to the great campaign of conquest launched by the Empire at the Fury Born's command, was without a doubt the largest miltary invasion ever launched by a single power - the fact that none before or since ever grew to match the Empire's size notwithstanding. The armies of Paragon poured across the Empire's borders, obliterating any attempt at armed resistance with frightening ease as they tore through the border states that separated the Empire from the Kingdoms of the West. Those Kingdoms had just enough time to rally their forces before the Empire's armies reached them, and their warleader was a canny captain. He fell back and fell back again, pulling the First Paragon Army deep into Kingdoms territory until its supply lines were stretched to the limit and then cut them off. The Second and Fourth Armies, further back, raced to support them, but by the time they'd arrived the Longbowmen of the West had done their lethal work and only a fragment of the First Army remained. Yet even that crushing victory was not enough to stop the Fury Born's mad campagin - in fact to her it only strengthened her reasoning. The armies ground forward against the hit and fade tactics of the Kingdoms, matching magic and numbers against the prowess of their enemies until the Kingdom's Captain called together all his forces at the port of Jisan for a last stand. Historians have debated the logic of this action for centuries, and the battles that followed are among the most famous of the war. For weeks Jisan held against the might of Paragon, sucking in more and more men until even the seemingly bottomless depths of the Empire began to strain. And had it only been the armies of Paragon against those of the Kingdoms, the bold gambit of Warleader Stelos may well have succeeded. But not against the Fury Born. She herself came from the Empire to oversee the final stages of the siege, and with her came the first of many terrifying weapons that she created to ensure her victory. What followed was horrific. The Fall of Jisan Jisan was a fortress city founded when the Kingdoms of the West were one, incorporating ancient magics into its walls that stood against fire, stone and sorcery with equal vigour. Referred to as the Heart of the Kingdoms after they were split, it was the one place where the differences between the Kingdoms fell away. No single Kingdom ever controlled Jisan, and it was this symbolism that Warleader Stelos drew upon when he arrayed his forces for a final stand against Paragon's armies. For months upon months they held unbowing against the hammering steel of their enemies as the nations to the East of the continent rallied their own forces to march in defence of the Kingdoms. Perhaps it was this final act that brought the Fury Born down upon them, perhaps she would have done so anyway. Yet in the end, what matters is that she came. She came with death at her back, blood at her lips, and the fire of an unending thirst for vengeance upon her fingers. The Blood Legion followed her from Paragon, where she had worked a terrible magic upon those who had fallen against the Western Kingdoms and infused them with a tiny fragment of her own essence. These were beings like her, totally in her thrall, and with a physical form that could act as ablative armour. And the night following her arrival, she came for the defenders of Jisan. Those few hundred soldiers who were ordered to and and did escape the Fall of Jisan told of a tide of dead that crashed into their walls like a tsunami, refusing to die even as they were hewn limb from limb. Dark magic turned the night sky a bloody red, calling down a rain of fire upon the city that killed Westerner and Paragon alike as the invaders swarmed forward. Yet the wards of the city held even then, holding back the worst of the destruction as the civilians left within the city were frantically packed aboard ships in the city's fortified harbour. With them went a good half of the Kingdom's surviving Sorcerers, to protect the ships from attempts by the Paragon to destroy them. The rest stayed behind and at the orders of Warleader Stelos prepared to confront the Fury Born when she attacked the warded walls of Jisan. It iss said that the Warleader himself struck the first blow against the bloody figure of the Fury Born that she ever truly felt when she reared above the walls of the city he had sworn to protect. Magic followed behind the swordblow, crackling and screaming across the air to slam into the being of blood and vengeance. But it was simply not enough. The Fury Born threw herself upon the walls, swelling in size until she rivaled the vast bulk of an elder dragon, and huge claws of molten blood tore the anciently warded stone asunder. The Blood Legion poured through the hole torn in the city's defences, the new Paragon cabal reaching through the weakness ripped in its magical defences and tearing them down to let the hail of fire and molten stone rain down unabated. Sorcery blasted across the once fair streets of the city, levelling ancient buildings to kill foes and assemble new frantic baricades as the Warleader raced for the Citadel. The Fury Born's Blood Legion pushed them back steadily supported by their mistress, as the flesh-and-blood armies set the city and all within it ablaze. Rape and worse stalked the streets for the mad hours of that night, the magic of the Fury Born and her cabal tearing apart any Gifted who attempted to hinder their advance. The Port and the Citadel held through the entire night, until every ship had escaped safely to sail for Azhahad or further East and Stelos was fully prepared for what was to come. At dawn the gates of the Citadel swung upon and he and his remaining warriors charged out into the rising light of day. On the ships further out to sea, safe now from harm, the Sorcerers reached across the miles between them and Jisan to watch the final stand of their cvilisation. Stelos and those beside him - the surviving Kings of each Western Kingdom - had taken up the arms and armour of the Western Kings within the citadel, and with them they carved a path to the Fury Born. They knew they were doomed, but they didn't care. The Kings fell to give Stelos his chance and the Warleader, in that moment King of Kings, thrust the Sword of the King into the centre of the Fury Born's twisted form, knowing exactly what she would do. She snapped the blade contemptuously, crushing his body as she sent her Legion streaming into the Citadel to claim it, and then discovered the final resort that the Western Kings had made Jisan. The Sword of the King was bound to the Jisan, and as it broke in defence of its home it triggered a sorcerous trap of devestating scope; the city of Jisan flashed into obiliteration in a pulse of magic almost strong enough to unmake the Fury Born herself. Almost. The Siege of the Throat The Fall of Jisan, by all accounts, should have stopped Paragon's Rage with the destruction of the Fury Born. The power embedded in the city's stones ran deep and strong and it was the opinion of many for the first month after - as the Armies of Paragon ground to a stumbling halt - that Stelos's last trick had indeed succeeded. The ships of the West reached Azhahad and beyond with their stories of woe and warning, yet even the most paranoid of them expected only for the Empire to burn itself out in a mad quest for continued vengeance. They could never have imagined the situation which truly came about. For the Fury Born did not die on the day of Jisan's fall, she did not die in the flash of ancient magic that burned away an entire fifth of Paragon's military strength, she did not even die when that same magic came turned from rampant destruction to target her as the one who released it. Yet in a way that only a few have ever een able to understand, the Fury Born was a being beyond death. She could be wounded, rent and torn by blade or magic, yet seemingly never destroyed. It was only in the last days of the war that her weakness was unravelled, but that came after the defeat of her armies at the Throat of the World. The fortresses that guard the Western side of the Throat had been almost totally rebuilt by the time that the Fury Born rose anew to lead her armies forward against the once again fragmented nations that stood between the new borders of Paragon and the Ash Crown mountains. And this time she marched at the head of a host that held far more than simple men. The Blood Legion was expanded, growing with a voracious hunger every time it passed through settled areas, and the twisted experiments of the Fury Born and her cabal were perfected in the creation of true monsters for the attack on the Throat. Giant men with claws for fingers, many granted batlike wings to aid in sieges. Huge beasts, knit together from the remains of dozens of corpses. All and more were present in the Blood Legions. Villages burned behind their advance, left empty and carpeted in blood as they neared the Throat, and it was an army driven by bloodlust that first hurled itself upon the great fortresses that guarded the place. The Fury Born's generals expected a stiff resistance that would be followed by ultimate victory within no more than a few months. They were met with something quite different. Five full Guard Regiments, not the one expected, rallied to the defence of the Western Throat when the Legions attacked. Beside them stood every Sorcerer who had escaped the Fall of Jisan and parity in Azhahad Gifted. The Aerial Legion held the skies, lance and bow and beak and claw more than a match for the winged beasts of the Legions. Yet far worse were the cannons that the refurbishment program had commisioned and placed upon the walls of the Throat. Crude compared to modern artillery certainly, but against creatures that had only ever faced the terror of muscle-powered weaponry, gunpowder came as a terrible surprise. Not that it existed, but that the Throat had weapons that used it. And it was that that broke the first, days long, assault; the slow drumbeat of cannonfire. Sword and sorcery played their part, and killed far more, but they failed to have the same effect. There were countless battles to come, yet it was the first of them that in a strange way sealed Paragon's fate. Until now they had never retreated from an enemy unless ordered to. They had stood and fallen in the service of the Fury Born, but there on plain before the Western Throat that mindless discipline met its match in the unending rumble of black powder. And so they broke. They did not run or rout, the retreat was well orchestrated, but it was not ordered. And on that day the invincibility of the Empire was...cracked. Not broken, but the damage had been done. In the months that followed, the full might of the Empire was focused upon the Throat. Siege towers crawled across the plain, catapults opening breaches in the wall through which vast charges were led. Arrows and sorcery criss-crossed the air between the walls and the Paragon lines, and beneath it boomed - night and day - the cry of gunpowder. The Fury Born had disregarded such weapons as useless, relying on the power of magic and sheer numbers to overwhelm all those who stood against her. And indeed, on the whole she was right to do so. Against Jisan or the West, cannon would have been of little use. The ancient wards built into the walls of the fortresses of the Kingdoms would have held firm against them just as they did against all the Empire threw against them anyway. Yet at the Throat, Imperial Cannon could have matched the batteries fielded by Azhahad, at least in showing that they were not some terrible Azhahadan devil weapon. Paragon's Fall The Throat held for an entire year against the Empire, drawing deeply upon the reserves of men and arms that Azhahad had access to. By the time the first contingents of the Army of the East marched through the city amid cheers from the populace on its way to reinforce the Throat, eighty thousand men and woman were on the line under Guard arms. Yet that figure says nothing of the brave men and women who ensured that the Throat remained supplied even in the face of airborne attacks. It does not speak of the Sorcerers who sold their lives upon the high walls of the fortress, nor the soldiers who came from the nearer nations of the East soon after Paragon launched its attack. It does not even speak of the - oft overlooked - commitment of theThanatocracy of Kemuliaan that held morale steady even in the worst days of the siege. But when the Army of the East reached the Throat, it was Guard Regiments that led the charge against the Legions of Paragon behind a hail of iron. The 10th Guards led the tip of the Eastern spear, the men of the unit raised barely two years ago yet already veterans at the first Battle of the Throat now tempered by a year of war into a blade of men with few equals. Under the command of the now Lord Marshal Jane Breezeborn, the 10th Guards hammered a wedge of steel through the Imperial lines to capture the forward command post. The guns of the Throat boomed out in endless tumult, joined by Eastern Army field guns, and beneath the hammering iron and slashing steel, the Legions of Paragon broke. They had carried their war to the very steps of the Eastern Continent, but here upon what would in time come to be known as the Fields of the Dead, that bottomless discipline failed them. The result was the very massacre that the Fury Born had imagined for the armies of the Eastern Continent, only in reverse. Tens of thousands died that day, yet the losses were overwhelmingly in the Eastern Army's favour and they refused to give their enemy even a chance to regroup. The generals of the force knew well that the Army would hold together only for as long as their homes were threatened, and so the majority of them pushed for an advance as swift as humanely possible. Hundreds of ships were dispatched to supply the Army's progress and leap-frog forces along the continent's coastline to secure cruicial ports. The Aerial Legion flew countless sorties, harrying the enemy from above as they passed messages between the multi-headed attack slamming a dozen swords into the Empire's weakened heart so that each blow landed in sequence. It did not go all the way of the East, several times they were driven back with heavy casualties by ambushes or the influx into the battlezone of a new Blood Legion, yet in the end these setbacks proved to be only temporary. Only one power had a chance to stop the Army of the East, but by the time the Fury Born arrayed herself against those who truly did seek to tear her down, it was too late. For the Sorcerers of the West had matched blows with that dreadful power on more than one occasion, and with the time the Siege of the Throat gave them, they were able to decipher a weakness that the Fury Born had no awareness of. A weakness that was never revealed, not even to the highest generals of the invasion or scholars who came afterwards, for to do so would allow the one who knew to - in time - discover a way to replicate the process that had created the Fury Born. No Sorcerer of the West, nor of Azhahad, were willing to contemplate such a thing, and at the end of the war they willing wiped their minds of that secret. So at the Gates of Paragon, when the Fury Born arrayed herself in rage against the Army of the East that had paid such a price to reach her, every Sorcerer of the Western Kingdoms and Azhahad stepped from the ranks to do battle with the creature. In the resulting clash, the great city of Paragon - in its own way as unique and far more magnificent than Azhahad - was all but totally destroyed. Only one in three of the Sorcerers who stepped forward to fight the Fury Born returned, haunted and forever changed by what they had witnessed in the heart of the Imperial Palace when they had finished their enemy - an act that every Gifted on the two continents felt. Yet in the end, the East was victorious. Paragon fell behind a legacy of vicious history, its people torn and scattered by the war and their magical heritage entirely lost. Legacy With the fall of the Fury Born, the Empire of Paragon would have descended into chaos but for one thing; the compassion of those who defeated them. The generals of the Army of the East returned to a summit held in Azhahad, and there they argued long and hard for the restoration of the lands that the Fury Born - and they themselves - had laid waste to in the long years of war. They argued with such force, in fact, that their leaders took them seriously. At the end of the summit, each nation of the East pledged with word, gold and blood to support the restoration of the West. The Western Kingdoms were reborn, those who had fled the conflict returning to build anew. The daughter of Warleader Stelos was named Queen of the fledgling state, and under her guidance they grew steadily so that they might once again return to their old borders. Jisan was never rebuilt, for none who tread there felt worthy of disturbing the earth upon which so many brave soldiers had died to defend the soul of a nation, and instead a monument was raised before the arcane scar seared into the earth were Stelos was believed to have fallen. The cenotaph held the name of every man, woman and child lost by the Western Kingdoms in the war, and before them lies to this day a simple inscription; "Glory and honour to the victorious dead. For without their sacrifice our soul would have been lost forever." The other nations of the continent recovered too - albeit more slowly in most cases - and with the support of the East they soon were able to return to more than a shadow of what they had been before the war. They could never forget, but they would endure and thrive again. But then there was the more complicated question. What to do with the remains of the Empire of Paragon. For a long time the question was tossed back and forth, none wishing to be the one to decide the fate of an Empire that had, in the end, suffered just as badly if not worse in the final stages of the war than any other nation of the West had during it. Its population reduced by almost two thirds, economy a broken wreck and with an infrastructure in ruins it was difficult to be angered by the people forced now to live in the ruins of what they could still remember as being one of the most advanced cultures on earth. In the end the Generals decided after one of them found in the Memorial Library of Velikan I an ancient map that showed the old national boundaries before the Empire's founding. From this they drew new borders into being across the old Empire, dividing its power carefully between the new nations. It might not have been a will liked decision, but it was in fact a decision, and one close to too long in coming. Many of the new nations faltered and were amalgamated or conquered in the years that followed the full withdrawal and disbandment of the Army of the East, but at the end of the day the solution worked. With the royal line and the old nobility all dead, there was no one with any legitimacy behind them to try and unite the nations, and so the Nations of Paragon became just another section of divided powers scattered along the furthest reaches of the West. The memory of the Empire of Paragon has never been forgotten; not the incredible wonders it created nor the absolute horror it unleashed upon the world and the fact that both came from the same source has been an object of much debate over the rightfulness of sorcery's existence. A debate that has continued to this day and likely will never truly be finished, and also one that in its own way has brought so much good to the world at the same time as it has destroyed. A parallel, then, to the Empire that spawned it. And in its own way quite fitting.